Methinks, before the issue of our fate,
A spirit moves within us, and impels
The passion of a prophet to our lips.--ANONYMOUS.
O vitae Philosophia dux, virtutis indagatrix!-CICERO.
[“O Philosophy, conductress of life, searcher after virtue!”]
Upon leaving the House of Commons, Mordaunt was accosted by Lord
Ulswater, who had just taken his seat in the Upper House. Whatever
abstraction or whatever weakness Mordaunt might have manifested before
he had left his home, he had now entirely conquered both; and it was
with his usual collected address that he replied to Lord Ulswater’s
salutations, and congratulated him on his change of name and accession
of honours.
It was a night of uncommon calm and beauty; and, although the moon
was not visible, the frosty and clear sky, “clad in the lustre of its
thousand stars,” [Marlowe] seemed scarcely to mourn either the hallowing
light or the breathing poesy of her presence; and when Lord Ulswater
proposed that Mordaunt should dismiss his carriage, and that they should
walk home, Algernon consented not unwillingly to the proposal. He felt,
indeed, an unwonted relief in companionship; and the still air and the
deep heavens seemed to woo him from more unwelcome thoughts, as with a
softening and a sister’s love.
“Let us, before we return home,” said Lord Ulswater, “stroll for a few
moments towards the bridge: I love looking at the river on a night like
this.”
Whoever inquires into human circumstances will be struck to find how
invariably a latent current of fatality appears to pervade them. It is
the turn of the atom in the scale which makes our safety or our peril,
our glory or our shame, raises us to the throne or sinks us to the
grave. A secret voice at Mordaunt’s heart prompted him to dissent
from this proposal, trifling as it seemed and welcome as it was to his
present and peculiar mood: he resisted the voice,--the moment passed
away, and the last seal was set upon his doom; they moved onward towards
the bridge. At first both were silent, for Lord Ulswater used the
ordinary privilege of a lover and was absent and absorbed, and his
companion was never the first to break a taciturnity natural to his
habits. At last Lord Ulswater said, “I rejoice that you are now in
the sphere of action most likely to display your talents: you have not
spoken yet, I think; indeed, there has been no fitting opportunity, but
you will soon, I trust.”
“I know not,” said Mordaunt, with a melancholy smile, “whether you
judge rightly in thinking the sphere of political exertion the one most
calculated for me; but I feel at my heart a foreboding that my planet
is not fated to shine in any earthly sphere. Sorrow and misfortune have
dimmed it in its birth, and now it is waning towards its decline.”
“Its decline!” repeated his companion, “no, rather its meridian. You are
in the vigor of your years, the noon of your prosperity, the height of
your intellect and knowledge; you require only an effort to add to these
blessings the most lasting of all,--Fame!”
“Well,” said Mordaunt, and a momentary light flashed over his
countenance, “the effort will be made. I do not pretend not to have felt
ambition. No man should make it his boast, for it often gives to our
frail and earth-bound virtue both its weapon and its wings; but when the
soil is exhausted its produce fails; and when we have forced our hearts
to too great an abundance, whether it be of flowers that perish or of
grain that endures, the seeds of after hope bring forth but a languid
and scanty harvest. My earliest idol was ambition; but then came others,
love and knowledge, and afterwards the desire to bless. That desire you
may term ambition: but we will suppose them separate passions; for by
the latter I would signify the thirst for glory, either in evil or in
good; and the former teaches us, though by little and little, to gain
its object, no less in secrecy than for applause; and Wisdom, which
opens to us a world, vast, but hidden from the crowd, establishes also
over that world an arbiter of its own, so that its disciples grow proud,
and, communing with their own hearts, care for no louder judgment than
the still voice within. It is thus that indifference not to the welfare
but to the report of others grows over us; and often, while we are the
most ardent in their cause, we are the least anxious for their esteem.”
“And yet,” said Lord Ulswater, “I have thought the passion for esteem is
the best guarantee for deserving it.”
“Nor without justice: other passions may supply its place, and produce
the same effects; but the love of true glory is the most legitimate
agent of extensive good, and you do right to worship and enshrine it.
For me it is dead: it Survived--ay, the truth shall out!--poverty, want,
disappointment, baffled aspirations,--all, all, but the deadness, the
lethargy of regret when no one was left upon this altered earth to
animate its efforts, to smile upon its success, then the last spark
quivered and died; and--and--but forgive me--on this subject I am not
often wont to wander. I would say that ambition is for me no more; not
so are its effects: but the hope of serving that race whom I have loved
as brothers, but who have never known me,--who, by the exterior” (and
here something bitter mingled with his voice), “pass sentence upon the
heart; in whose eyes I am only the cold, the wayward, the haughty, the
morose,--the hope of serving them is to me, now, a far stronger passion
than ambition was heretofore; and whatever for that end the love of
fame would have dictated, the love of mankind will teach me still more
ardently to perform.”
They were now upon the bridge. Pausing, they leaned over, and looked
along the scene before them. Dark and hushed, the river flowed sullenly
on, save where the reflected stars made a tremulous and broken beam on
the black surface of the water, or the lights of the vast City, which
lay in shadow on its banks, scattered at capricious intervals a pale but
unpiercing wanness rather than lustre along the tide, or save where the
stillness was occasionally broken by the faint oar of the boatman or the
call of his rude voice, mellowed almost into music by distance and the
element.
But behind them, as they leaned, the feet of passengers on the great
thoroughfare passed not oft,--but quick; and that sound, the commonest
of earth’s, made rarer and rarer by the advancing night, contrasted
rather than destroyed the quiet of the heaven and the solemnity of the
silent stars.
“It is an old but a just comparison,” said Mordaunt’s companion, “which
has likened life to a river such as we now survey, gliding alternately
in light or in darkness, in sunshine or in storm, to that great ocean in
which all waters meet.”
“If,” said Algernon, with his usual thoughtful and pensive smile, “we
may be allowed to vary that simile, I would, separating the universal
and eternal course of Destiny from the fleeting generations of human
life, compare the river before us to that course, and not it, but the
city scattered on its banks, to the varieties and mutability of life.
There (in the latter) crowded together in the great chaos of social
union, we herd in the night of ages, flinging the little lustre of
our dim lights over the sullen tide which rolls beside us,--seeing the
tremulous ray glitter on the surface, only to show us how profound is
the gloom which it cannot break, and the depths which it is too faint
to pierce. There Crime stalks, and Woe hushes her moan, and Poverty
couches, and Wealth riots,--and Death, in all and each, is at his silent
work. But the stream of Fate, unconscious of our changes and decay,
glides on to its engulfing bourne; and, while it mirrors the faintest
smile or the lightest frown of heaven, beholds, without a change upon
its surface, the generations of earth perish, and be renewed, along its
banks!”
There was a pause; and by an involuntary and natural impulse, they
turned from the waves beneath to the heaven which, in its breathing
contrast, spread all eloquently, yet hushed, above. They looked upon
the living and intense stars, and felt palpably at their hearts that
spell--wild, but mute--which nothing on or of earth can inspire; that
pining of the imprisoned soul, that longing after the immortality on
high, which is perhaps no imaginary type of the immortality ourselves
are heirs to.
“It is on such nights as these,” said Mordaunt, who first broke the
silence, but with a low and soft voice, “that we are tempted to believe
that in Plato’s divine fancy there is as divine a truth; that ‘our souls
are indeed of the same essence as the stars,’ and that the mysterious
yearning, the impatient wish which swells and soars within us to mingle
with their glory, is but the instinctive and natural longing to re-unite
the divided portion of an immortal spirit, stored in these cells of
clay, with the original lustre of the heavenly and burning whole!”
“And hence then,” said his companion, pursuing the idea, “might we also
believe in that wondrous and wild influence which the stars have been
fabled to exercise over our fate; hence might we shape a visionary clew
to their imagined power over our birth, our destinies, and our death.”
“Perhaps,” rejoined Mordaunt, and Lord Ulswater has since said that his
countenance as he spoke wore an awful and strange aspect, which lived
long and long afterwards in the memory of his companion, “perhaps they
are tokens and signs between the soul and the things of Heaven which do
not wholly shame the doctrine of him [Socrates, who taught the belief in
omens.] from whose bright wells Plato drew (while he coloured with his
own gorgeous errors) the waters of his sublime lore.” As Mordaunt thus
spoke, his voice changed: he paused abruptly, and, pointing to a distant
quarter of the heavens, said,--
“Look yonder; do you see, in the far horizon, one large and solitary
star, that, at this very moment, seems to wax pale and paler, as my hand
points to it?”
“I see it; it shrinks and soars, while we gaze into the farther depths
of heaven, as if it were seeking to rise to some higher orbit.”
“And do you see,” rejoined Mordaunt, “yon fleecy but dusky cloud which
sweeps slowly along the sky towards it? What shape does that cloud wear
to your eyes?”
“It seems to me,” answered Lord Ulswater, “to assume the exact semblance
of a funeral procession: the human shape appears to me as distinctly
moulded in the thin vapours as in ourselves; nor would it perhaps ask
too great indulgence from our fancy to image amongst the darker forms in
the centre of the cloud one bearing the very appearance of a bier,--the
plume, and the caparison, and the steeds, and the mourners! Still, as I
look, the likeness seems to me to increase!”
“Strange!” said Mordaunt, musingly, “how strange is this thing which we
call the mind! Strange that the dreams and superstitions of childhood
should cling to it with so inseparable and fond a strength! I remember,
years since, that I was affected even as I am now, to a degree which
wiser men might shrink to confess, upon gazing on a cloud exactly
similar to that which at this instant we behold. But see: that cloud has
passed over the star; and now, as it rolls away, look, the star itself
has vanished into the heavens.”
“But I fear,” answered Lord Ulswater, with a slight smile, “that we can
deduce no omen either from the cloud or the star: would, indeed, that
Nature were more visibly knit with our individual existence! Would that
in the heavens there were a book, and in the waves a voice, and on the
earth a token of the mysteries and enigmas of our fate!”
“And yet,” said Mordaunt, slowly, as his mind gradually rose from its
dream-like oppression to its wonted and healthful tone, “yet, in truth,
we want neither sign nor omen from other worlds to teach us all that it
is the end of existence to fulfil in this; and that seems to me a far
less exalted wisdom which enables us to solve the riddles, than that
which elevates us above the chances, of the future.”
“But can we be placed above those chances;--can we become independent
of that fate to which the ancients taught that even their deities were
submitted?”
“Let us not so wrong the ancients,” answered Mordaunt; “their poets
taught it, not their philosophers. Would not virtue be a dream, a
mockery indeed, if it were, like the herb of the field, a thing of
blight and change, of withering and renewal, a minion of the sunbeam and
the cloud? Shall calamity deject it? Shall prosperity pollute? then let
it not be the object of our aspiration, but the byword of our contempt.
No: let us rather believe, with the great of old, that when it is based
on wisdom, it is throned above change and chance! throned above the
things of a petty and sordid world! throned above the Olympus of the
heathen! throned above the Stars which fade, and the Moon which waneth
in her course! Shall we believe less of the divinity of Virtue than
an Athenian Sage? Shall we, to whose eyes have been revealed without a
cloud the blaze and the glory of Heaven, make Virtue a slave to those
chains of earth which the Pagan subjected to her feet? But if by her we
can trample on the ills of life, are we not a hundredfold more by her
the vanquishers of death? All creation lies before us: shall we cling
to a grain of dust? All immortality is our heritage: shall we gasp and
sicken for a moment’s breath? What if we perish within an hour?--what
if already the black cloud lowers over us?--what if from our hopes and
projects, and the fresh woven ties which we have knit around our life,
we are abruptly torn?--shall we be the creatures or the conquerors of
fate? Shall we be the exiled from a home, or the escaped from a dungeon?
Are we not as birds which look into the Great Air only through a barred
cage? Shall we shrink and mourn when the cage is shattered, and all
space spreads around us,--our element and our empire? No; it was not
for this that, in an elder day, Virtue and Valour received but a common
name! The soul, into which that Spirit has breathed its glory, is not
only above Fate,--it profits by her assaults! Attempt to weaken it, and
you nerve it with a new strength; to wound it, and you render it more
invulnerable; to destroy it, and you make it immortal! This, indeed,
is the Sovereign whose realm every calamity increases, the Hero whose
triumph every invasion augments; standing on the last sands of life, and
encircled by the advancing waters of Darkness and Eternity, it becomes
in its expiring effort doubly the Victor and the King!”
Impressed by the fervour of his companion, with a sympathy almost
approaching to awe, Lord Ulswater pressed Mordaunt’s hand, but offered
no reply; and both, excited by the high theme of their conversation,
and the thoughts which it produced, moved in silence from their post and
walked slowly homeward.